Review: Among the Living, by Jonathan Rabb
Other Press, 2016. 303 pp. $26

When Yitzhak Goldah, a Czech Holocaust survivor, lands among his American cousins in Savannah, Georgia, in 1947, he at once becomes an object of fascination and dread in the Jewish community. Most people act as if they want to know what happened to him and what he feels about it. But they don’t, really. They’re scared of what he might say, but even more of what that would force them to reckon with–their guilt at having escaped, while their European brethren were murdered.

Congregation Mickve Israel, Savannah, Georgia, which dates from 1735, as it appeared in 2015 (Courtesy Jud McCranie, via Wikimedia Commons)

So they make sympathetic noises, and when he doesn’t respond the way they hope or think he should, they ascribe his reaction to “all you’ve been through,” without an inkling of what that is. And since he’s reticent by nature, a trait that his experiences at Theresienstadt and Birkenau only reinforced, he lets them assume what they wish, unwilling to reveal more and sensing that they wouldn’t hear it anyway.

He’s right. His cousins and benefactors, Abe and Pearl Jesler, have done their best to make him over. They haven’t even driven him home from the train station before they’ve told him that from now on, he should be Ike, not Yitzhak (Isaac, in English); he’ll work at Abe’s shoe store; attend services at their Orthodox synagogue; and, oh, by the way, there’s a party tonight in your honor, so you’ll want to take a nap first.

Ike feels more comfortable among the black servants and shoe-store employees (who of course are the ones to fetch and haul). It’s not just that he recognizes people who have suffered, or that, like him, they stand outside the gate of what’s accepted and acceptable, though he does so by choice. He grasps implicitly their fate never to be spoken of as an equal, for he endured that too; but again, he’s left that behind, whereas they’re still trapped. But more than that, he finds that Calvin, who tends Abe’s stock room, and Raymond, Calvin’s son, who drives a delivery truck, speak directly, from the heart, and he yearns for that.

He finds it also with Eva, a young war widow with whom he strikes up an immediate rapport. But to Abe, Pearl, and their community, Eva’s the enemy, because she’s Reform, not Orthodox. Maybe you’ve heard the old jokes about the town with two Jews and three synagogues, or about the Jewish castaway who builds two houses of worship on his island, so he can have one that he doesn’t go to. But here, it’s no joke, and Rabb nails that tribal fractiousness dead-center. Ike and Eva ignore the social pressure, but they’re lucky to have an ally. Her father runs a local newspaper, and Ike was a journalist in Prague before the war. You can guess where that will lead.

However, Rabb introduces a further complication, and here’s where things get tense. A woman whom Ike knew from Prague, and whom he thought had died in the camps, comes to Savannah too. And she says he promised to marry her, and that he owes her a good life, at least an attempt at what the Nazis interrupted. They don’t love each other and probably never did. Yet, as she says, if he turns her away, he’ll have to live with that forever. So what does he do? What can he do?

There’s much to like about Among the Living. I admire Rabb’s gift for economy, conveying what remains unsaid during social interactions, and his pitch-perfect rendering of innuendo and gossip. The story offers rich material in which to explore fear, prejudice, and trauma, much of which the author suggests with a subtle hand. For instance, a subplot concerning corruption at Savannah’s docks, for which Raymond pays a gruesome price, provides a contrast to Ike: Rabb sets the hero victim who stands as rebuke to repression against a black man who remains unknown and unsung, and for whom justice doesn’t exist. It’s a nice touch, and it makes you think.

Nevertheless, this lovely novel doesn’t deliver on its promise. Rabb captures the tribal milieu, but he doesn’t persuade me that this is 1947, and that everyone’s recovering from a world war. Rather, so intent is he on separating Ike’s experiences from everyone else’s, it’s as if the war had been an event in which participation was entirely voluntary, and most people in Savannah had simply opted out. Further, though Ike and Eva are engaging characters, I don’t know them as well as I’d like, particularly why he attracts her so easily, though I can see it the other way around. Finally, Rabb does his best to keep you guessing about how things will turn out, but I think he needed to push his characters further away from the happiness they deserve. With a subject like this, it’s hard to balance fairness with a satisfying reality, and yet, I wanted more from Among the Living.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Imagine an 1870s southern gentleman from Atlanta, schooled in Latin, Greek, French, and the latest techniques in dentistry, such as the use of ether and restorative surgery. He treats everyone he meets with respect, though you’d do well not to question his truthfulness or mention the name William Tecumseh Sherman. He knows how to calm a frightened horse or a child, having innate empathy for both, and the hands that draw rotten teeth can play Beethoven on the piano like a virtuoso or deal faro or poker all night. But the great tragedy of this accomplished, engaging young man’s life–for he’s twenty-two–is that he’s dying of tuberculosis, the disease that took his beloved mother from him years before. He’s playing a losing hand against time, yet pretends he doesn’t know it.

John Henry Holliday’s graduation photo from the Philadelphia School of Dental Surgery, 1872. He was not yet twenty-one (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons; public domain).

His name is John Henry Holliday, known as Doc. And if you read this marvelous biographical novel, which I highly recommend, you can forget anything you think you know or have heard about his reputation as a gunslinger or cold-blooded killer. According to Russell, who argues openly for her subject, there was plenty of mayhem in Dodge City, Kansas, where Holliday settles, hoping the climate will help his lungs, but few duels with six-shooters. And what Hollywood and popular legend have made of Wyatt Earp, the Earp brothers, the O.K. Corral, or Bat Masterson bears little resemblance to fact or, more importantly, a deeper, more compelling story.

Rather, Russell portrays a Holliday who wishes to live to the fullest. He loves poker, waxing philosophical about “the enchanted moment” when a bet is placed, when “anything is possible” and a “man’s debts and regrets and limitations disappear.” But true satisfaction comes in his dental office. For instance, having intuited that Wyatt Earp never smiles because of damaged teeth, Holliday deploys all the art and science he commands to ease his friend’s pain and make him happier. Lonely for people who understand Dostoyevsky, Austen, and Brahms, he’s ecstatic when he meets a former Prussian aristocrat turned Jesuit priest, with whom he discusses Scripture and music. When Father Arnsperger says that he heard Chopin himself play, Holliday dramatically flings himself back and responds, “I am prostrate with envy, sir!” It figures that the woman Doc takes up with, Mária Katerina Harony, known as Kate, comes from a Hungarian noble family and can quote Latin and Greek right back at him.

In less skilled authorial hands, a narrative like this could sound cute, superficial, or elbow-in-the-ribs obvious, quirky for its own sake, gimmicks to lure the reader with anecdote after anecdote about the rollicking Old West. Not here. Russell provides plenty of funny, poignant stories, and she’s combed the historical record for one-liners, a few of which are memorable. But the characters seem so completely themselves, and the time and place so fully lived in, that she achieves a portrait of Dodge in a wide, deep swath.

Front Street was alive with young men. Sauntering, staggering. Laughing, puking. Shouting in fierce strife or striking lewd whispered bargains with girls in bright dresses. They were giddy with liberty, these boys, free to do anything they could think of and pay for, unwatched by stern elders, unseen by sweethearts back home, unjudged by God, who had surely forsaken this small, bright hellhole in the immense, inhuman darkness that was west Kansas.

But it’s not just the vigorous prose; the characters’ stories illumine so many facets of life. For instance, Wyatt’s unsmiling, unflinching code of right and wrong forms a counterpoint to the rest of Dodge. The story behind Bob Wright, who owns the general store (and much else), captures local politics and business ethics. How people treat Mr. Jau, the Chinese laundryman who gives Doc herbal medicines for his TB, shows how racial prejudice plays out. And Kate, a whore like almost every other woman in town, exemplifies the unequal struggle against men, their desires, and self-aggrandizing misperceptions–she’s just more astute, if crazier, than her sisters.

Russell has researched so much about everything that it would be easy to ascribe her achievement to what she’s learned and how she’s deployed it. That’s certainly the public perception about historical fiction; tell someone you’ve just met that you write in that genre, and nine times in ten, you’ll be told how hard the research must be. But any good novelist, historical or otherwise, must have psychological insight, and you won’t find that in the library. What puts Russell in a different class, I think, is how she tackles issues like Doc’s feelings about death or Wyatt’s about bullies, which makes these characters–and the narrative–richer and fuller, not just another rollicking tale about the Old West.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

The summer of 1922, fifteen-year-old Louise Brooks can’t wait to leave Wichita, Kansas, for a month-long New York tryout with an avant-garde dance company. Given the political and social tenor of Wichita, Louise’s parents seem unusually liberal and open-minded, but, to their daughter’s disgust, they give out that they’re looking for a respectable woman to chaperone her. Cora Carlisle, mother of two sons about to enter college, volunteers for the job, and the Brookses accept, while making it seem as if they’re doing her a favor. As for Louise, she promises to be absolutely horrible:

But there was no mistaking the contempt in the girl’s eyes. It was the way a child looked at the broccoli that must be eaten before dessert, the room that must be cleaned before playtime. It was a gaze of dread, made all the more punishing by the girl’s youth and beauty, her pale skin and pouting lips. Cora felt herself blushing. She had not been the subject of this sort of condescension in years.

However, that’s not half of it. No sooner have the two travelers boarded their train than Cora begins to sense what she’s up against. Louise has read all the books Cora has, and then some. She’s even brought Schopenhauer along, which would seem pure affectation, except that she’s marked passages where the philosopher’s observations move her. Unlike Cora, Louise disdains Prohibition, wears no corset (but plenty of makeup), and sees nothing wrong with letting men flirt with her, some of whom are old enough to be her father. Cora assumes that naive, inexperienced Louise is merely acting out, an adolescent unaware of consequences, and that her parents have been negligent in raising her. That they have, but she’s no innocent, nor do appearances fool her, as when she wonders how someone as dull and restrained as Cora could have attracted a man as handsome and successful as her husband. Naturally, the remark cuts the older woman to the quick, especially because, as the reader soon learns, Cora’s marriage isn’t what it seems.

Cinemaphiles may recognize Louise Brooks as a star of the silent screen; her bobbed hair helped make that style a symbol of the 1920s, and she was the film incarnation of the flapper. So in casting her opposite Cora, Moriarty has drawn the battle lines, for Cora is a fictional representation of a Midwestern Progressive who fought for woman suffrage but has the social and sexual prejudices common to her time and class. At first, therefore, The Chaperone promises to be a funny, sharply observed clash of outlook, to which the splendid sequences in New York, full of feeling and atmosphere, lend zest. Then, to Moriarty’s further credit, the narrative takes off to a higher level altogether.

Cora, it turns out, was an orphan, raised by a Catholic home for abandoned girls, and shipped by train westward, traveling station to station until someone liked the look of her and took her in. Several novelists have written about these trains, and no wonder (see, for example, My Notorious Life); what a heart-breaking story, and Cora’s had me cringing in pain. But the surprise of The Chaperone is that it’s not just Louise who’s looking forward to a taste of freedom in New York. Cora, who has been dutiful all her life, has undertaken to search for her birth mother, and though many obstacles get in her way, she won’t take no for an answer. She could never explain this to Louise, but of the two of them, she winds up having the more satisfying, successful trip.

The Chaperone is a wonderful book, beautifully written, the characters well drawn, even the minor ones. Moriarty thrusts them boldly into situations from which they don’t always emerge proud of themselves, and I like that–except when her earnestness gets the better of her. For instance, when Cora’s horrified to attend a theatrical performance where black and white sit together and the performers are African-American, the author immediately drops in a scene in which a more tolerant Cora talks to black activists in the 1970s. It’s as if Moriarty fears that we won’t like her heroine anymore and has to rescue her.

If there’s one problem with The Chaperone, it’s that discursiveness, the desire to tell all of Cora’s life. I don’t think Moriarty needs to, and the book runs at least fifty pages too long. They’re not bad pages, but they lack the substance of the rest, and the narrative has the feel of looking in vain for a strong ending. I think the story could have stopped years earlier, letting the reader imagine the rest. But still, it’s a terrific book.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

As a young North Carolina boy in the late 1950s, Raeford Hurley loses his parents in a car accident. He goes to live with his grandparents, who farm tobacco in Chatham County, not far from Durham. They’re kind to him, and he loves them, but he misses his mother and their brief joyful moments:

We laughed, jumping around and making fools of ourselves, until we had to sit down on the floor. Her happiness would flow out like a circling wind and wrap me up, pulling me into her joy, letting me know it was okay to be alive and be silly. Daddy was the only one I ever saw who could make Momma’s eyes water. I think he would sometimes be mean to her on purpose just to show us life was serious and hard, and not to be wasted being childish. My momma was too gentle to die.

Right away, you understand what Raeford, known as Junebug, is looking for. And where he tries to find it, or, rather, with whom, makes for a gripping premise. Junebug’s only friends are two African-American twins, Lightning and Fancy Stroud, whose sharecropper parents work for white families. By the time they’re fifteen, in the early 1960s, Fancy and Junebug realize their attraction for one another. Despite the threat of exposure and violence in a community where the Ku Klux Klan holds sway, they have a passionate, all-consuming affair.

What’s more, Fancy’s the sexual aggressor, making so many passes at Junebug that there’s no doubt she’s willed them to be together. Hasn’t she been raised to fear such impulses, especially where white boys are concerned? She says she has, yet her romance with Junebug feels inevitable. You know they’ll sleep together; you just don’t know exactly when.

Johnson writes as if Fancy and Junebug were like any two teenagers, who, given time and mutual attraction, will do what comes naturally. There’s naive charm in this, to be sure, but it’s also hard to believe. Surely, they’ve been taught that their relationship is anything but natural, so you’d expect them to struggle against that constraint and get to where they can embrace one another and damn the bigoted world. Instead, the process unfolds externally, based on facts rather than psychological depth–they’ve known each other since they were kids, they find warmth and laughter in each other, and their hormones are overflowing.

Consequently, The Last Road Home feels too self-conscious by half, and the failure to evoke time or place suggests a rootlessness, much as with the orphaned Junebug himself. Johnson excels at interiors; you see the tobacco farm, the chores, the general store in town, and so forth. But you don’t see the town itself, the red dirt by the roadside, or the Confederate flags on the license plates; you don’t smell the tobacco curing when you drive the highway; and the 1960s never emerge, at least not to suggest that the characters live and breathe in their milieu. Even civil-rights protests rate barely a mention, and then only so that a character can predict that the racial landscape will surely change one day.

Rather, Fancy and Junebug exist in a private vacuum. They have no other friends to provide a context or influence their outlook, and Johnson has kept their families small–and, except for Junebug’s grandmother–mostly out of sight. This may seem convenient, because there’s nobody around to upset the grand design, but that’s precisely the difficulty. Rather than explore the interracial love to which other people object, Johnson stuffs the plot with extraneous obstacles, as if blind hatred and the risk of lynching weren’t enough trouble. Without giving anything more away, I’ll paraphrase the jacket flap (too revealing, as is typical). Junebug gets involved in a business deal that goes wrong, leaving him “with a dark secret” he can’t tell anyone. Later, he goes to war, and though the flap doesn’t say where, you know it must be Vietnam.

That’s a lot of heavy lifting just to separate star-crossed lovers. Johnson could have accomplished the same thing had he not restrained the town bigots, who take their time to react and pull their punches when they do. As a result, though The Last Road Home sometimes hits its stride (the Vietnam combat sequences are especially vivid), the novel seems like an explanation rather than a story, a collection rather than a synthesis.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Do authors have the right to tell stories from a culture to which they don’t belong? That question has roiled the literary world recently, though I’m not sure why it should. I believe in freedom of expression, which includes not having to ask permission to tell a story that nobody owns anyway. Condemning any work out of hand, especially on cultural grounds, sounds like an attempt to muzzle a voice with which you fear you may disagree, but to which others, less erudite or correct than yourself, may fall prey. It’s as if the old saw, “write what you know,” has assumed the force of literary law, which one breaks at his or her peril, and that there’s only one way to know anything: by direct experience.

Fie, I say. And yet, I also believe that if you’re going to write about anything, whether you’ve lived it or not, you’d better do your homework. That’s why The Last Brother, an otherwise accomplished novel in two important respects, leaves me shaking my head.

The premise, seemingly utterly improbable, actually isn’t. It’s 1944, and Raj, a young Mauritian boy, learns that a nearby prison contains white people, which would be strange enough, except that these prisoners seem too beaten-down and harmless to be criminals. What the reader understands, but Raj doesn’t, is that the prison serves as a displaced persons camp, and the inmates are Jews, though how they got there remains a mystery until the end.

Raj’s father, a terrifying brute, works at the camp as a servant. One day he beats the boy so badly that he must be hospitalized, and the camp possesses the only facilities. While there, Raj befriends David, a refugee from Prague his own age, the first friend he’s ever had. It’s a clever conceit, since both boys have lost everything. David’s whole family have been killed, whereas Raj’s two brothers both died in a mud slide, a tragedy that shadows him constantly. Understandably, Raj believes that meeting David gives him the chance at having another brother, hence the title.

So there’s a story here worth reading, and Appanah’s prose sings it:

For here, at Mapou, the glistening rain which falls from heaven, fine and gentle, almost like a caress, the rain that refreshes and for which one thanks heaven, such a manna did not exist. At Mapou the rain was a monster. We could see it gathering strength, hugging the mountain like an army rallying before an assault, hear the orders for battle and slaughter being given. . . We would raise our eyes toward the mountain while the dust granted us a respite, and the sighs of our elders would prepare us for the worst.

How, then, can things go wrong for The Last Brother? First (and I hate playing a familiar tune, but it’s unfortunately apt), the author chooses to tell the whole story in retrospect, starting with a prologue that falls absolutely flat. Not only does the opening give away what Raj has become and, to an extent, how, it reveals that David dies at age ten. Right away, that undercuts the tension, but it’s to serve a purpose, one I don’t agree with, but more of that in a moment. The older Raj, looking back, feels such intense grief over David’s grave that it seems overwrought, because the context only comes much later. I suspect that Appanah does this because she wanted to close with the story of how these Jews wound up interned on Mauritius, as though that were the climax, and so she turns the narrative on its head.

As for revealing straight out that David dies, I further suppose that she wants to underline what the older Raj says later. Toward the end, he observes that he coopted David as a replacement brother, completely ignoring whatever his friend must have gone through, as if the other boy existed only for him. This seems too authorial for me, interposing an adult thought in a scene narrated by a child. But that’s only half the problem.

The other half is that Appanah has borrowed the Holocaust without knowing a thing about Jews. The Holocaust gets thrown around quite a bit, and I wish it weren’t, but, as I said, I’ll defend Appanah’s use of it so long as she’s done her homework, and its evocation seems honest rather than cavalier. Unfortunately, I’m not convinced. The Jews are shadow figures at best, even David, of no significance other than their difference from anyone Raj has ever seen. The few details of dress or language ring false, and the crowd of prisoners might be anyone, as if they, like David for Raj, were a mere convenience, in this case, for the author’s purposes.

I never knew there were displaced Jews imprisoned on Mauritius, and I salute Appanah for recounting this story. I only wish she’d bothered to make them real.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

This engrossing novel imagines Napoleon’s final years, when the Royal Navy escorts him to St. Helena, an island in the South Atlantic, where he is to live out his days. Since the British assume that their famous prisoner has other hopes, if not explicit plans, for escape, they’ve chosen St. Helena for its lack of beaches and position athwart key trade routes, including that from India.

Napoléon at St. Helena, by François-Joseph Sandmann, undated (courtesy Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

From the moment Napoleon arrives in Jamestown, the only town on St. Helena, he casts a spell:

The dread that seized the port in that instant was not only for the man’s devilish reputation, not only for the fact that he was the Great Ogre, but once more that his tread would rock the earth, and that the escarpments above Jamestown would shatter, and boulders the size of God’s hand would descend on the town’s humble roofs. Many indeed must have felt like that, since when the cutter was not so far off, the crowd, which had been vocal all day, grew near to silence, and what had been shouts became whispers. . . .

Like many Englishmen in St. Helena, William Balcombe is fascinated beyond mere curiosity. Known to intimates as Billy, he works for a trading firm doing business with the East India Company. He’s been granted a sizable residence, with orchard and lands surrounding, and a separate house that, with minor alterations, provides a suitable home for Napoleon and his small retinue. Indeed, Billy, a man who likes giving dinner parties where wine flows freely, is delighted to have such close acquaintance to the prisoner, whose charm quickly wins over all the Balcombes–save one.

That one is daughter Betsy, about to enter her teenage years. Known as “impudent” or “wild,” Betsy–to the special horror of the emperor’s retinue–uses her growing skill at the French language to ask him how, for example, he could abandon one army in Egypt and another in Russia. These are excellent questions, and you’d think that the people who’d dubbed him ogre would applaud her acumen. But no; she’s punished instead for her willfulness, though the ogre himself insists that he likes her frankness, even if it takes him up short.

Naturally, Betsy’s less interested in great campaigns than the battle for her own dignity, and she’s trying to figure out whether, say, the games of blind-man’s-bluff she plays with Napoleon are fit for a person such as herself on the verge of womanhood. But that only adds layers to this most unusual story. I can’t think of any other coming-of-age novels in which the mentor character is such a famous, controversial figure, and Keneally uses this relationship to masterful effect. At times the narrative, with its intense focus on manners and social signals, reminds me of Austen, but with a twist: You can feel the dust of lost empires and passionate enmities that would flame at the slightest provocation.

Betsy seeks Napoleon out not just because he’s famous or charming. If Betsy looks to a Bonaparte for her education, it’s because the Balcombes provide none. She has an older sister, Jane, who’s so straight and narrow, forever hoping to set a good example, that even Betsy, who loves her, tires of her; one reason Betsy must test everything and everyone around her is that Jane won’t. (Is it coincidence that Daughters of Mars, Keneally’s fine novel about Australian nurses in the First World War, also featured two sisters, one impulsive, one restrained?) But the Balcombes, chalking Betsy’s behavior up to an ungovernable character, miss the point completely. Napoleon’s got spine, a quality the girl’s father sorely lacks–to his family’s great detriment–and it never occurs to Billy that his younger daughter would even want or need to know what this substance is all about. And in her quest to understand feelings that lie just beyond her ken, she learns about truth-telling, secrets, and power.

The latter lesson comes painfully to the fore when a new governor comes to St. Helena, Sir Hudson Lowe. What a nasty piece of work he is–petty, sadistic, self-righteous, paranoid, and determined to punish Bonaparte any way he can. Since by now the exile is Our Great Friend to the Balcombes, this makes their connection a matter of state, with potentially disastrous consequences for William and his family. The narrative drops hints about this–Betsy narrates from retrospect–so it comes as no surprise. But if I can say this about a writer I admire as much as Thomas Keneally, I’d prefer he just tell the story. No portents necessary, here.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.